The Next Time He's Wrong:
Will the President Push The Button?Federation of American Scientists Warns
of Shift Toward Nuclear Preemptionby Greg Moses
www.dissidentvoice.org
March 21, 2006

As
our ears prick to the drumbeat of Bush v. Iran, a highly respected
researcher from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) warns that
Washington is edging toward a policy of nuclear preemption, and Teheran
knows it.

Although the post 9/11 doctrine of USA
military strategy known as “Global Strike” is often promoted as a post
nuclear plan, Hans M. Kristensen finds documentary evidence that a
“nuclear option” is included.

In a timeline released by FAS on March 15,
and so far reported only by long-time disarmament activist Sanford
Gottlieb’s op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, Kristensen concedes that the USA
may be reducing the size of its huge nuclear-weapon stockpile.

However, writes Kristensen, “Global Strike
is first and foremost offensive and preemptive in nature and deeply rooted
in the expectation that deterrence “will” fail sooner or later. Rather
than waiting for the mushroom cloud to appear, a phrase used several times
by the Bush administration, the Global Strike mission is focused on
defeating the threat before it is unleashed.”

So while the USA stockpile is down to about
5,000 or 10,000 nuclear warheads, Kristensen argues that planners of the
new regime in military strategy, “simultaneously have created a new
mission that reaffirms the importance and broadens the role of nuclear
weapons further by changing or lowering the perceived threshold or timing
for when nuclear weapons may be used in a conflict. That threshold must be
different than in the past, otherwise why include a nuclear option in
CONPLAN 8022?”

CONPLAN 8022 is the Pentagon’s contingency
strike plan that Kristensen is tracking through freedom of information
requests. He calls CONPLAN 8022, “a new strike plan developed by STRATCOM
[the Pentagon’s Strategic Command, tasked with taking the lead in matters
of weapons of mass destruction] in coordination with the Air Force and
Navy to provide a prompt global strike options to the President with
nuclear, conventional, space, and information warfare capabilities.”

Kristensen could have also mentioned that
the language and logic of CONPLAN looks very much like the thing suggested
in 1997 by a blue-ribbon National Defense Panel (NDP) that included
top-level military brass and the now recently departed Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage.

“Rogue states and terrorists, perhaps armed
with weapons of mass destruction, may attempt different kinds of attacks,
not only on our forces abroad, but in our homeland, in urban areas and
perhaps space,” warned the first paragraph of the NDP press release on
Dec. 1, 1997. While the NDP report encouraged nuclear disarmament
agreements such as SALT III, the framework of diplomacy was presented as a
stratagem that would have to make do until the USA achieved technological
superiority:

“Given the evolving threat and continued
improvement of our missile defense technology, a hedging strategy, rather
than immediate deployment of a missile defense system, is a sensible
approach,” said the NDP report. “But, it is important that we proceed in a
way that permits rapid deployment if threats should develop and our
technologies mature.”

The NDP report encouraged the military to
“experiment” with solutions to the “power projection challenge” that would
be faced in tough cases of threat by missile, when the USA would not have,
in the words of one panelist, “access to forward bases, ports, airfields,
facilities.” Of course, that was years before 9/11.

Kristensen’s timeline marks June 2004 as the
point where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld orders the implementation of
CONPLAN 8022 so that the president of the USA could be enabled with, “a
prompt, global strike capability.” Rumsfeld’s order was issued
approximately one year before release of the Downing Street Memo alleges
that the president of the USA has been fixing his facts to meet the needs
of his trigger finger.

Six weeks after Rumsfeld gave the order,
writes Kristensen, “on August 17, STRATCOM published Global Strike Interim
Capability Operations Order (OPORD) which changed the nature of CONPLAN
8022 from a concept plan to a contingency plan. In response, selected
bombers, ICBMs, SSBNs, and information warfare units were tasked against
specific high-value targets in adversary countries. Finally, on November
18, 2005, Joint Functional Component Command Space and Global Strike
achieved Initial Operational capability after being thoroughly tested in
the nuclear strike exercise Global Lightning 06.”

What this alphabet soup spells out is a
process that brings “Global Strike” into operation through military
exercises that confirm the readiness of nuclear missiles launched from
land, sea, and air. The next “war game” in this series is scheduled for
April.

The release of Kristensen’s timeline
coincided with a scheduled hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee
on Thursday. But the hearing was postponed at the last minute.

Says Kristensen, “Because the question of
the scope of and assumptions about nuclear weapons use in the Global
Strike mission has profound implications for U.S. military strategy and
international affairs, it is vital that the Congress, the media, and the
public in general get better answers.”

Thanks to the din of Bush v. Iran, however,
Kristensen’s plea for sunlight has not yet been answered. Meanwhile, a
contract to provide the infrastructure for CONPLAN 8022 is scheduled to be
awarded in December.